Monday, September 19, 2011

AP: Farmers flee as world's deadliest volcano rumbles

The reason I bring this story to your attention are the following two quotes:

QUOTE #1: "The April 1815 eruption of Tambora left a crater 11 kilometers (7 miles) wide and 1 kilometer (half a mile) deep, spewing an estimated 400 million tons of sulfuric gases into the atmosphere and leading to "the year without summer" in the U.S. and Europe. It was 10 times more powerful than Indonesia's much better-known Krakatoa blast of 1883 — history's second deadliest. But it doesn't share the same international renown, because the only way news spread across the oceans at the time was by slowboat, said Tambora researcher Indyo Pratomo. In contrast, Krakatoa's eruption occurred just as the telegraph became popular, turning it into the first truly global news event."

QUOTE #2: "Temperatures worldwide plummetted, causing crops to fail and leading to massive starvation. Farmers on the northeastern coast of the U.S. reported snow well into July. In France, grape harvests were decimated. Daniel Lawton of the wine brokerage Tastet-Lawton said a note in his company's files remarks that 1816 was a "detestable year" and yielded only a quarter of the crop planted."

Is it reasonable to assume that this could happen again in the near future? With similar results? Perhaps so, in which case you could imagine what would happen with the social order of today once food supplies run low. Yet another reason to both store food AND have a garden. The food you store can get you through the times when crops won't grow well and the garden can provide food during times of normalcy and after a recover from such an even takes place.